Dear family:
It is a perfectly lovely day outside, but since I have been bitten by a mild
intestinal virus, I am not up to doing anything ambitious out there, so it seems
like a good time to write a letter. The house is perfectly quiet. David is
preaching morning and evening services at a church in Philadelphia, Daniel is
visiting a Hopkins friend in New Jersey, Ben is playing at Amy’s house next
door, and the other boys are at the home of church friends. This kind of quiet
is just what the doctor ordered!
For months I have forgotten to mention that there was an article in the
February edition of Reader’s Digest taking about the joys of living in
a small town – and the writer is from Bethlehem. What you may not have noticed
is that the accompanying photograph (the street where they live) is Lorain
Ave.(where our Feaver home was), and the tree is the tree in front of Mrs.
Dunlap’s house!
There has been a lot of coming and going in the past weeks, as all of the
boys except Ben have spent at least a week at French Creek camp, though not all
at the same time. They all enjoy having a chance to get away, and the very
rustic nature of the camp makes them equally happy to come home to modern
luxuries. In addition to camp, Christopher completed two weeks at the vo-tech
school, and Stephen went to a week of vacation Bible school. Although these
kinds of activities free up some hours of supervision from me, they involve so
much driving around and watching the clock that I’m not exactly on vacation.
In that vein, the KFC manager has been annoying in scheduling Peter just an hour
or two off from Daniel in this last month, so that we have all those extra trips
dropping him off and picking him up. The nice thing about living in an area with
distinct seasons is that the next one comes along just in time to change the
challenges.
One sad event that happened while Chris was at camp was that his two female
guinea pigs died after having been given a cold bath by Stephen, who was
concerned that they were too hot one sticky, muggy day. (We had some days that
were so humid the ink ran off my kitchen calendar.) The guinea pigs have
delicate constitutions, and the extreme temperature change was too much for
them. We now have just the one male, though Chris has plans to remedy that soon.
I always start the summer with a list of projects, things that I don’t have
time for in the school year that I imagine will be easy to get done in the
summer. I never make it all the way through the list, but so far I have made and
canned about 30 jars of barbeque sauce, which was one of them. I am also working
on going through drawers or closets and clearing things out. Stephen and Chris
worked very hard going through the basement playroom and weeding out old or
broken toys. This kind of "clearing the decks" of clutter would make
my mother very happy, though there is much more to be done.
As I mentioned in my last letter, it seems that a lot of our days have
included supporting the medical profession. All the boys had annual physicals;
poor Ben had FIVE shots at his four year visit. They even wanted to give him a
sixth one (a new vaccine) but I decided that was over the top. We’ve had a
number of dental appointments – the most major one was two adult teeth
extracted from Christopher because his mouth didn’t have room for them. They
had the most extraordinary long roots, and Chris has suggested stringing them on
a necklace to ward off dentists from getting any ideas about extracting others.
Another activity that always takes longer than seems reasonable is paperwork.
With Ben going to nursery school, and Peter going to high school, there is a
surprising amount of paperwork I have to fill out. Then I have the various
affidavits and course objectives to write up for homeschooling, and further
papers for MAFA (actually a double dose because I am a parent and a teacher) and
all of the above mentioned summer programs have their requirements, too. I need
a full time secretary! Somehow I thought the computer revolution was supposed to
reduce paperwork.
Speaking of computers... all of the hoopla about the DSL line was premature,
as David alone has had the benefit of it. Daniel and Peter’s computers have
been on and off, and no one has been able to hook mine up, so my Internet access
still goes through the phone line. I guess we need to send Dan back to Hopkins
for a little more training. In addition, the man who installed the line
accidentally cut my doorbell, so now I don’t have a doorbell, either, and I
can’t even access David’s printer through the network anymore. You can tell
where I fall in the pecking order here. Nevertheless, some of Peter’s free
time is spent working on the web site for David, so there is one step forward to
offset the two steps backward.
But in truth Peter doesn’t have much free time anymore. Soccer tryouts
began last week and it was two hours each morning and two each afternoon,
although the coach was more inclined to go for a half hour longer each session.
Peter made it on to the team, thankfully, and will have his first scrimmage this
week. Stephen’s team has begun its three times a week practice, so we are back
into the soccer season with a vengeance. The Lehigh freshmen arrive at the end
of the week; for us that event is always the official end of summer – and
Peter starts school the following Wednesday, so it will be an early start for
everyone.
I gave Daniel the choice of a birthday party or a family outing to a nice
restaurant to celebrate his birthday, and he chose going to a local steakhouse,
which we finally got around to doing on Friday. Ben wanted to help make his own
birthday cake, and has thoroughly enjoyed being the birthday boy for a week or
more. Their birthdays usually coincide with Musikfest, and this year we went
down about three times (after several years of not going at all). I’ll confess
that we didn’t hear much music – we were looking for some of the good food.
Personal favorites include the crab soup served in a sourdough bead bowl, the
fresh hot soft cinnamon pretzels, and bratwurst with sauerkraut -- finished off
with funnel cake, of course. We did listen to the German bands and watched the
waltz and polka competitions. I liked one grey-haired man who did tricks with a
yo-yo while dancing.
David has been commuting to Philadelphia about three times a week, meeting
with pastors and trying to involve a larger number of churches in our presbytery
in the ministry. He also spends a lot of time corresponding with students via
email, and is preparing his fall Bible studies. He is a big help to me in
preparing my weekly studies for our summer women’s group. I have one last
study to go, and I am simultaneously sad and relieved!
I’ve had some nice evenings out, too. David and I went to see The
Patriot, and another night Judy and I watched Topsy-Turvy (a rather
bleak look at Gilbert & Sullivan behind the scenes). I went to Lancaster to
attend the birthday party of old ministry friends. It is most unusual for me to
have four hours alone in a car, and I used the time to listen to the memorial
service for Dr. Boice and two other sermons by Eric Alexander. Very rich and
meaningful indeed.